Almost all of the increasing number of available portable electronic devices, including telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), digital cameras, mp3 players, and so forth, routinely depend upon batteries as a power source. For convenience and to ease battery replacement costs, rechargeable batteries have found wide utility in powering contemporary consumer and business products. For example, nickel cadmium batteries may be used to energize portable electronic devices and then repeatedly recharged and reused. Rechargeable batteries are typically recharged by plugging an AC-powered charger unit into the portable electronic device and into an AC power wall receptacle. The AC-powered charger unit typically converts 110 or 120 volt AC current from an outlet to low voltage DC power used to recharge the batteries. Without some sort of management system, the number of electronic devices that need to be recharged and the charger units associated with each electronic device can quickly become both unsightly and unwieldy.
The increase in the number of portable electronic devices has lead to the introduction of battery charging stations that provide a mechanism for charging rechargeable batteries. Such stations are convenient and useful, but are inadequate in that they only recharge certain types of devices, are difficult to use, do not incorporate a surge protector and are not multi-functional. Accordingly, there exists a need for a battery charging system that provides a mechanism for charging a variety of devices, increases the number of devices that can be charged at the same time, incorporates a surge protector and also holds other objects that do not need to be charged, such as a wallet or keys.